J.D. Vance’s Vision of Appalachia Is Nothing New

 https://time.com/6999981/j-d-vance-appalachia-history/

For the next two decades, missionaries pitched their efforts to “reclaim” Appalachia by purposely shocking readers and compelling them to donate to the cause. Through newspaper and magazine reports that took unusually extreme examples and portrayed them as common occurrences—like the Tennessee minister who accepted payment for his services with a shot of whiskey—missionaries told stories about the supposed laziness, dirtiness, and violence of Appalachia’s white residents. Their favorite technique was to capture readers’ attention with sensational descriptions of what seemed like African Americans’ dilapidated, filthy, and dark hovels in the woods, filled to the brim with barefooted and rag-clad people—and then surprise the reader by announcing the report was in fact, about a typical mountain white home. Outside aid was needed, the stories told readers, to bring mountain whites up to a respectable level if white Americans were to “hold the fort” of their social and political authority.